Been thru most of these. Lived with chronic pain. Wife and I lost our jobs this year within a few months of each other. Had someone credibly threaten to sue me for more than I could afford. Dealt with depression & suicidality. Worked from home with a gun on my desk because the cops wouldn’t do anything about my batshit insane neighbor.

The list of problems I have proven to myself I can survive grows longer every day. I have the contact info for a good psychiatrist, lawyer, and physical therapist. I know who my support network is, and exactly how far I can stretch a dollar. Yes, bad things happen now that are worse than when I was younger. But I am stronger and more in control of my life. Problems that would have broken me down when I was just starting out are things I can now handle without so much as elevating my heart rate.

And, there are new joys that have only become accessible to me through the benefit of experience! Fears I have conquered, hangups I have gotten over, people I have warmed up to.

Getting older doesn’t just suck. I think it just seems that way because people (on the internet at least) find it really easy and relatable to complain.

The big divide in the US is not so much between Republicans and Democrats as between people who invest and people who don’t. For a man of his means who is running for America’s second-highest office, Tim Walz is on the wrong side.

God forbid a leadership position go to someone not in the ownership class!

In 2022, 58 per cent of Americans owned stock, either directly or indirectly through mutual funds. Based on his 2019 financial disclosures and his 2022 tax filings, the Democratic vice presidential nominee is not one of them.

So? The average American, who has maybe a 401k and some options thru their company, still has more shared class interests with someone who owns no stocks whatsoever than with someone who doesn’t have to work for a living.

The rest of the article fails to load, but looking at the author’s other pieces, we see she thinks price gouging is a myth and that another recession might actually be a good thing. She’s either so out of touch she may as well be from outer space, a soulless corporate sellout, or intentionally writing ragebait with an economic coat of paint.

Fifty-three percent of respondents hold a “very or somewhat” unfavorable view of the system, while 40 percent hold a “very or somewhat” favorable view.

I swear to God, you could ask “Do you enjoy being hit in the face with a hammer?” in a poll and 30% - 50% of my countrymen would answer “yes”. At least one third of this country lives in a completely different reality.

Thank you for your wonderful and informative comment! I went out back to see if she was still there / look for an egg sack, and snuck another pic. She’s quick! Ran up the fence as soon as she saw me!

RIP Kumoko.

True that! Almost got a face full of this guy earlier this week:

I wonder if spiders put webs in front of windows to catch bugs that fly towards the light, or if they put webs all over a building and we only see the ones near the windows?

Cute comic!

BRONCO IS TAKING HIM INTO THE SCREWS, KENNY!

I spent all afternoon reading that comic, having to call it a night on chapter 93. Thanks for the link!

Welcome to the club! I love my P1S. Biggest problem so far has been some squeaky pulleys, but a little bit of oil fixed that right up.

I would guess the logic behind going harder on repeat offenders is that they’ve already been punished once and didn’t stop breaking the law, so we should punish them harder this time. Not sure that’s super effective reasoning, but w/e.

Carries a gun

Violently terrified of others carrying guns

This guy was never not going to murder someone.

Yep. Prisoners and homeless people are there to remind you what happens if you stop making money for the boss man. Plenty of horrible, exhausting, unsafe jobs get away with paying dogshit wages because it’s either that or being thrown into the maelstrom of human misery that is being incarcerated / unhoused. How many people would die of heat exhaustion in an Amazon warehouse if they knew their basic needs would still be met if they quit?

I would love to only be accountable to “guidelines” instead of “rules” or “laws”.

These guns are different enough in actual use to make one more dangerous than the other. They both can kill you dead, but one literally is designed specifically to be deadiler in several ways. It’s one of the reasons mass murders keep using it specifically to mas murder people.

Others have already explained how they’re both equally lethal, but to your point about mass murderers using the one over the other: The top rifle can be had for ~$400 & looks like the one all the soldiers and video game guys use. The bottom is closer to $1000 and does not look as cool (to the young adult male demographic that commits most mass shootings, at least). I would argue those two factors account more for their difference in mass shooting use than anything else.

In the US, there is a history of white performers using blackface to play caricatures of black people, leaning hard on racist ethnic stereotypes. From Wikipedia:

The minstrel show, also called minstrelsy, was an American form of theater developed in the early 19th century.[1] The shows were performed by mostly white actors wearing blackface makeup for the purpose of comically portraying racial stereotypes of African Americans. There were also some African-American performers and black-only minstrel groups that formed and toured. Minstrel shows stereotyped blacks as dimwitted, lazy, buffoonish, cowardly, superstitious, and happy-go-lucky.[2][3] Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music performances that depicted people specifically of African descent.

He prayed for a TV and a gun. Clearly both were answered, hallelujah!

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The RPD pointed out that an attorney for the Abbouds had released home security footage of the raid online, which the police said made releasing the body camera footage redundant. At the same time, the RPD claimed that releasing the body camera footage might expose confidential information about search warrant execution or damage officers’ reputations.

You busted in a door and pointed an AR-15 at a baby. Your reputation should be fucking damaged.

Raleigh police “wrongfully executed a ‘Quick Knock’ warrant”—meaning they kicked in the door before the Abbouds had a chance to open it[…]

This is just a no-knock raid. Let’s not pretend knocking on a door a half second before pulling out the battering ram is some magical third category of warrant: no-knock raids should be banned, and whatever the fuck these cops did should be considered a no-knock.

I’m here for it. The purpose of protesting is not to wave signs around in a way that is convinient and easy to ignore. Protests are supposed to disrupt things, to get the attention of people in power. There’s supposed to be an implied threat: “Look at all these upset people who are willing to break the law. Be a real shame if they went from blocking traffic to dragging oil executives out of buildings!” A polite and legal protest may be great for movement building, but it’s ultimately the same as asking nicely in terms of power and demands. His only mistake, the way I see it, was not bringing more people with him.

Okay look. I am an atheist, I think magical thinking in general and Christianity in particular are harmful and unnecessary.

BUT

I also enjoy learning about new testament history as a hobby. I’ve actually read the book How Jesus Became God that the article mentions, and they do a sneaky thing that annoys the shit out of me: they quote things being said by someone who disagrees with them that appear to completely demolish their own position, without quoting the explanation and nuance that inevitably follows. Ehrman obviously doesn’t see the quoted text as a problem for the idea of a historical Jesus, and usually explains as much after saying something like that.

I won’t nit-pick all the little over-simplifications, but I want to make an example out of one of them:

The gospel of Mark is thought to be the earliest existing “life of Jesus,” and linguistic analysis suggests that Luke and Matthew both simply reworked Mark and added their own corrections and new material. But they contradict each other and, to an even greater degree contradict the much later gospel of John, because they were written with different objectives for different audiences. The incompatible Easter stories offer one example of how much the stories disagree.

The incompatible Easter stories are actually something many secular scholars point to as evidence in favor of a historical Jesus.

I’ll go into more detail if anyone cares, but the broad strokes are this: the nativity narratives in both Matthew and Luke contradict not only each other but also known history and even basic plausibility. We’re pretty confident they were both made up.

So, why? Why would two different authors working from the same source material both tell weird lies about Jesus’ birth?

Well, the expectation of the Jewish public at the time was that the messiah would be born in Bethlehem. Mark doesn’t talk about Jesus’ birth, but it does say he was from Nazareth of Galilee. That presents a problem: how is this guy who people are calling Jesus of Nazareth also the messiah from Bethlehem?

That’s where we get Matthew and Luke trying to smooth things over: Matthew makes up a story about how Jesus was totally born in Bethlehem, trust me bro but Herod the Great tried to kill him so Joseph and Mary hid in Egypt until he died but then his son took over Judea so they moved to Nazareth. True story bro.

Then in Luke, the author says that Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth, but Caesar ordered a census of the whole Roman empire where everyone had to return to their ancestral homeland because reasons. So they go to Bethlehem because David was Joseph’s… great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather? Why they stopped at exactly twenty generations (and how the fuck Joseph would have known that before ancestry.com) is never specified.

Even if we grant miraculous intervention, these stories are both ridiculous on their face (at least, to a modern audience). If Jesus was fabricated whole cloth, why include these bullshit Easter narratives in the first place? Why not just say “He was born in Bethlehem” and be done with it? To my mind, these stories make the most sense as a post-hoc ass-covering to explain how the guy who was walking around calling himself “Jesus from Nazareth” was actually totally from Bethlehem the whole time.